In Code

Elsewhere

Support My Wording & Coding

At the
inaugural Agile Alliance Technical Conference,
I got to meet and hang out with lots of people I’ve looked up to for a
long time. It’s a thrill to have these face-to-face conversations, and I
don’t think becoming less new to consulting and conference-going will
ever make that less true.

Sessions

Of the conference sessions, my favorite was
James Shore test-driving CSS in front of an
audience. For one thing, someday I’d like to have a larger fraction of
his immense skill at doing and explaining. (He’s made several hundred
screencasts about test-driving JavaScript.)
For another, I was reminded that we as technologists already have
immense agency. Things are the way they are because people made them
that way; if we want things to be different, we can make them be
different.

Everyone who’s worked with Cascading Style Sheets knows it can be a pain
in the ass. James decided to do something about that, and started
building Quixote. And for the entirety of
his presentation, my face was stuck in a big dumb grin. So good, for so
many reasons.

Flipboard: takeaways from DevOps Dojo

My session was a 90-minute interactive workshop called “DevOps Dojo”. We
simulated Dev and Ops being forced not to work together, felt
non-simulated frustration, talked about how artificial the constraint
really was, and finally worked together the way we wanted to. Here are
the takeaways we wrote down:

Make repo readable to everyone

Exec sponsorship (training, “safe space to fail”, support for “doing
it right”, funding)

Focus on quality (metric: mean time to resolution)

Dev asks Ops about their needs

Exercise empathy

Be ready for change; practice change

Look for mutual interest

You’re welcome to use
the workshop materials
for any purpose, including your own workshop. If you do, I’d love to
hear about it.

Video interview

After my workshop, SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse asked me what it was
really about. Hint: not DevOps.
Take a look.

Panel discussion

See the name card? I was supposed to be there. Based on what folks
told me about what it was like to watch, listen, and ask questions,
Rachel Laycock’s
advance preparations enabled us panelists to have a conversation that
the audience appreciated being part of. Very effective moderating on her
part. For my part, in my first appearance on a panel, I appear not to
have disqualified myself from being invited on another one somewhere
someday. Here are a couple things I said that people liked: